The project to transform Venice into a startup city

An accelerator of innovative companies devoted to sustainability and science tries to rethink the development model of the Serenissima

Acqua alta in Venice (photo: courtesy of Venisia) Growing landless vegetables in a disused glass factory in Murano. Designing technological systems to find football talents from an office overlooking the Grand Canal. Discuss business plans between the Cannaregio or Dorsoduro districts. Will this be the Venice of the future? There are those who imagine a less touristy Serenissima, capable of carving out a role as a crossroads of innovation. It all began two years ago.

In search of an alternative

Venice, year 2020. The pandemic stops time in a city where the hands run slower than elsewhere. In the alleys, emptied of the flood of large ships, you can breathe an unreal air. Gone are the times of the assault based on backpacks and flip flops, in the lagoon the water becomes clear and even dolphins are sighted. But the emptied city offers no work. Plenty of homes have long since lost residents to become lucrative rental accommodation on the platforms. Trinkets shops are everywhere. The population today is around 50 thousand and decreases by one thousand per year, two thousand in 2020.

“This city has a sustainability problem of two types: environmental and social. The environmental one is linked to high water, the social one to depopulation "sums up Carlo Bagnoli, professor at Ca 'Foscari and promoter of Venisia, a new startup accelerator devoted to sustainability overlooking the Grand Canal, launched a few months ago with a call that has identified eleven young companies to lead to the market. Bagnoli's idea, who teaches at the local university, was born when the Strategy Innovation Forum that he has been organizing for six years was blown up twice in the space of a few months: first due to high water, then to the pandemic.

The key to the reasoning, in short, is to replace mass tourism with a constant presence of medium-long term residents, which make the maintenance of a city of breathtaking beauty sustainable. A city that owes everything to the sea, but which must defend itself from the sea. “In the 1950s, 170,000 people lived here. Today the surveys show that that figure comes every day from the sum of hikers, that is, those who come one day, dirty and leave, and the fifty thousand residents ”. The idea would be to run an economy today based on large numbers by replacing tourists, says the academician, "with what I call futurists: people who live here, even for a period of their lives that last only a few years".

An innovation hub

To do this, Bagnoli argues, we need a small community of innovators to make life in the lagoon attractive. The city is indisputably fascinating, already wired and served by a functioning airport. The plan is to launch an accelerator that takes advantage of the visibility, the allure and the infrastructures present to attract promising companies one after the other. Twenty thousand euros and a path to support big names such as Enel, Eni and Snam: this is the basic offer. He has already signed a De Longhi agreement, which comes from the territory; now we look abroad.

"The idea came to me talking to an Indian colleague who teaches at Harvard - says Bagnoli -. The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has attracted 100 remote workers by offering $ 9,000 a year in exchange for one day a month of community social activity. Presumably, people in the lagoon would be free, considering the view. ”

The first stone was laid with a call closed in August. The goal is to reach a critical mass of five hundred innovators, reached which, says the teacher, the mechanism should start by itself, exactly as it happens on the social networks of the web. Institutional banks are sought. “You have to make coming here attractive. There is already a law of the time of Minister Padoan (Pier Carlo, head of the Department of Economy and Finance from 2014 to 2018 ed) which promises low taxation for those arriving from abroad. Furthermore, we are working with the Farnesina to obtain an ad hoc visa for those who have to work here for just one year "continues Bagnoli.

Synthetic biology in the lagoon

Among the passers who have already completed migration there are Silvio Meazza, a former Milanese advertiser who opened his own agency in the Venetian capital, and Daniele Modesto, CEO of ZeroFarm, a vertical farming company. Modesto is looking for a disused glass factory in Murano to install vertical greenhouses (we talked about it here). The company, born in Pordenone, has an interesting business model and the potential to grow rapidly and act as a multiplier. But there is also Sphaera, who studies how to use industrial cameras to analyze the performance of players on the most remote playing fields and find talent around the world, in a sort of Big Brother of the ball. Customers? The great football clubs.

Not only that. Bagnoli also dreams of the first Italian bio-foundry on the model of Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston, capable of playing with the building blocks of life. It is called synthetic biology and is a territory between biology and engineering. Why in Venice? “Among other aspects, we thought that Venice could be a good place to conduct the ethical debate that always accompanies these issues”, Bagnoli continues. The synthetic biology sector, despite the fact that we are talking about a horizon of decades and the results are far from sure, is beginning to attract funding. According to SynBioBeta, an industry newsletter picked up by the New York Times, these young biotech companies seem to have raised $ 7.8 billion last year, more than doubling the 2019 figure. Over 30 billion are expected this year. br>
Will this be the Venice of the future? Soon to tell. A high-tech lagoon is an interesting oxymoron. But it is necessary to verify the economic sustainability, for all the actors, of an innovative model that insists on a city that, however, needs large flows of money. And avoid the risk of favoring further gentrification, moving those earning lower incomes to the suburbs, starting with Mestre. A theme with which the cities of art can no longer avoid confronting themselves. It will be up to politics to choose the model and untie the knots. To deliver the Venice of 2050 to us.


Environment - 20 hours ago

In recent years temperatures in Italy have risen faster than in the rest of the world


France wants to invest in new nuclear power plants


More and more companies try to use augmented reality in the factory

Topics

Environment Bioethics genetics startup globalData.fldTopic = "Environment, Bioethics, genetics, startup "

This opera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.